Worlds Elsewhere (71 page)

Back in 1581, Elizabeth I had appointed Edmund Tilney as the Master of the Revels (the Lord Chamberlain's antecedent) and issued a patent requiring ‘all and every plaier or plaiers … to presente and recite before our said Servant' every new script before performance would be allowed. Tilney ran the Revels office until his death in 1610, nearly all the years in which Shakespeare was writing for the stage.

The rules over what might give offence were vaguer and consequently more terrifying than anything dreamed up by the most capricious and power-hungry Communist Party apparatchik, and required sophisticated antennae. Foul or overtly sexual language was discouraged (one reason among many Shakespeare became so adept at puns). So was material that might incite sedition or which criticised the Church of England and/or the monarch. The scurrilous anti-Scottish jokes of the city comedy
Eastward Ho
(1605) caused George Chapman and Ben Jonson (again) to be clapped in jail for offending James I, which so petrified Jonson's mother that she prepared poison for him in case he received a death sentence. Offending powerful courtiers was likewise a bad idea, if one wanted to hang on to one's ears.

Shakespeare suffered nothing so extreme, but he certainly had tangles with authority. Around the early 1590s, still making his name as a dramatist, he contributed to a co-written play,
Sir Thomas More,
on the life of the Catholic martyr, which never got past the censor. As well as providing what appears to be the only source of Shakespeare's handwriting on a playtext, the manuscript, now in the British Library, is notable for Tilney's exasperated annotations.

Another incident occurred a few years later when Shakespeare adopted the name Sir John Oldcastle for the corpulent knight in an early version of
Henry IV Part I
– the same name as a fourteenth-century martyr. Oldcastle's descendants hotly objected, whereupon Shakespeare scrambled to change Oldcastle to Falstaff. There also appears to have been controversy concerning the abdication scene in
Richard II,
which disappears altogether from early printed quartos, presumably too sensitive to perform while Elizabeth I – sometimes compared to the profligate, corrupt, childless Richard – was on the throne.

Bad language, then as now, was a constant source of vexation. In 1606, a new Act ‘to Restrain Abuses of Players' was passed, levying a fine of £10 for every time an actor ‘jestingly or profanely' took the name of the Lord in vain. Shakespeare's scripts, in common with everyone else's, were scrubbed clean of references to God or Jesus Christ, and many
of the mealy-mouthed euphemisms that resulted are enshrined in the 1623 First Folio (‘O heaven!' for ‘O God', ‘O why!' for ‘zounds‘/‘God's wounds' and so on). Generally, however, Shakespeare's antennae (and ears) were in excellent working order, judging by how rarely he appears to have troubled Tilney or his successor George Buck.

One reason I'd first thought of following Shakespeare around the world was that he rarely set plays in his own country or during his own times, something I'd interpreted as evidence of his eager curiosity about the world beyond English shores. It was that, certainly, but of course there was another reason too. Setting plays in far-flung destinations – Vienna, Verona, Venice – and writing about Italian or French nobles rather than their English equivalents was a matter of professional caution. It offered something extremely useful for a playwright who wanted to keep his nose un-slit: the cloak of deniability.

I liked Shanghai: I liked its way of doing business, its style, its brazenness, its bling. From everything I'd read about China's most thrusting modern city, I'd expected a landscape entirely composed of jutting skyscrapers and futuristic steel spires. Skyscrapers and spires there were, more every week, but the city also looked delightfully jumbled, as if someone had negligently dropped a few arrondissements of Paris into the bustling heart of Asia.

After the inhuman grid of Beijing there was something comforting about the clutter of the French Concession, the way knock-off clothing shops sat hugger-mugger with chic boutiques, bicycle-repair stalls next to tiny French bakeries. Cranes and building sites were cheek by jowl with streets of wooden-framed houses, the skies between the buildings congested by power lines and brash overhead signs. Going for drinks at the rooftop bar at the Peninsula hotel on the Bund, Shanghai's waterfront, was pleasant – a triumphal avenue of water sparkling with a futuristic light show – but it was in the crammed and clamorous avenues of Xuhui, the heart of the old French district, that I felt most at home. I wandered late into the warm night among the barbecue stands and the hole-in-the-walls, where wizened men sat sharpening knives or repairing clothes with foot-pedal Singers.

Most of all I liked watching the fashion-obsessed millennial kids of Shanghai, in tribes as anthropologically distinct as anything analysed
by Claude Lévi-Strauss: scowling 1950s-style Teddy boys with gelled quiffs; art-studenty girls in ra-ra skirts and cowboy boots; preppy, fey-looking kids in blazers, moon-sized spectacles, bow-ties and loafers. Gourmandising on sticky pork dumplings, I sat for hours at open-windowed bars, watching the Shanghai
passeggiata
in its pomp.

Despite extensive attempts, I'd failed to get hold of Zhang Yiyi, the young Shanghainese author supposedly spending RMB 1.5 million on plastic surgery to make himself look like Shakespeare, the ultimate act of Bardic tribute. It turned out Zhang had a reputation for crazed publicity stunts designed to do well on social media. Even when he did appear in front of the public many months after I left, showing off his remodelled eyes, nose and lips, it was hard to spot the difference.

But I wondered if the city made sense of something else that had been bugging me: why
was
it that
The Merchant of Venice
was so popular in China? Although I had come to doubt the statistic that 21 million Chinese fourteen-year-olds studied the trial scene from the play (the figure turned out to have been cooked up by the Beijing office of the British Council and took little account of teaching in different provinces), many people I asked had been set excerpts from the text at school.

History was obviously part of it.
The Merchant of Venice
was one of the earliest Shakespearian scripts to be rehearsed by Chinese students in the nineteenth century, which perhaps encouraged Lin Shu to make
Rou quan
(‘Bond of Flesh') the very first story in
An English Poet Reciting from Afar.
An adaptation of
Rou quan
was also the earliest professional Shakespeare production ever to be staged in Shanghai in 1913. In 1930, when it came to staging the first faithful translation of a Shakespeare text, the Shanghai Drama Assembly chose, once again,
The Merchant of Venice.

On the face of it, it seemed strange that a script now seen as being primarily about anti-Semitism had found a home in an entirely different cultural context, China, a place moreover where the Jewish population was tiny. As I'd found, it was a similar issue in India, where
The Merchant of Venice
had likewise been hugely (to my mind surprisingly) popular.

As in Kolkata, I wondered whether Shanghai's history might have something to do with it. One of the few ports to be opened to western influence in the nineteenth century, the city became a pivot for international trade, and Jewish businesses were among the first to set up in the foreign concessions. The Sassoon family – known as the ‘Rothschilds of the East' and based in Mumbai – traded in tea, cotton and opium, and set up profitable outposts in Shanghai, Canton
(now Guangzhou) and Hong Kong. Other Jews followed, swelled by Ashkenazi emigration from Russia in the late nineteenth century. After the Russian Revolution, the Jewish population of Shanghai was small but influential, with several synagogues and yeshivas. The Jewish population of the city numbered perhaps 25,000 before the founding of the People's Republic forced nearly all non-Chinese to flee.

Was it any surprise the Shanghainese developed such a passion for this play, set in a seething entrepôt that so closely resembled their own? No doubt the concept of a woman donning the garments of a lawyer was an exotic attraction (Zheng Yuxiu, often described as China's ‘first female lawyer', had an office in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s), and perhaps the Jewish element also struck some chord of familiarity.

But it wasn't just that. Venice was a byword for global trade in the Renaissance, as was Shanghai in the early twentieth century. The merchant of the title, Antonio, has fingers in as many pies and ‘argosies' (merchant ships) in as many ports as any Chinese import-export business. There is languid talk of Tripolis, Mexico, the Indies. Shylock has bought jewels in Frankfurt. Even the wealthy heiress Portia, waiting in Belmont for a deal to be done over her marital future, receives suitors from as far afield as North Africa, France, Germany, Spain, Scotland and England.

As Marxist critics delight in pointing out, the language of value is hard-wired into the play; indeed, one of its central tensions is whether the word ‘worth' applies to a moral-cum-spiritual condition, or is a matter of cold cash. ‘Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth,' says the young blade Bassanio of Portia: a Shakespearian double meaning if ever there were one. Everyone is indebted to someone else – Bassanio to Antonio, Antonio to Shylock, Antonio and Bassanio to the disguised Portia, who rescues Antonio from the terrible consequences of the loan he has taken out. The network of financial and emotional obligation winds around and across the story until it enmeshes everyone.

Scanning headlines about the newly established Shanghai free-trade zone, the surging property market, unrestricted foreign exchange, the global companies rushing to invest, I wondered whether a piece of the Rialto wasn't being created right here on the river Huangpu.

Perhaps there was also a clue here about the object of my journey – understanding Shakespeare's place in the world and how it came about. Cultural thinkers have borrowed the (strikingly ugly) postmodern philosophical term ‘rhizomatic' as one explanation for Shakespeare's
global omnipresence. The word comes from
rhizome,
a botanical word for a variety of plant that, instead of shooting its roots down and growing up, sends them out in many different directions at once. These roots then send out leaves, in effect becoming new plants of their own, adjusting to local conditions and after time growing into something quite different. Consequently they are nearly impossible to eradicate: chop off one section and another will simply sprout again somewhere else. For globalisation theorists, a rhizomatic way of looking at the world is to see it as an interconnected network with no beginning, end or obvious centre, and where the connected points are all of equal importance.

Despite the implication that Shakespeare had become the Japanese knotweed or al-Qaeda of global culture, I found it a powerful idea – an image of his influence as a series of interconnected stems rather than deriving from a single ‘authentic' source, rooted in one place and time. Not a doughty British oak whose leaf canopy stretches across the world, but an ever-flourishing, ever-changing plant that belongs to many places simultaneously.
The Merchant of Venice,
a complex lattice of money and emotional relations, is surely a rhizomatic text, particularly in China, filtered through the Lambs' nineteenth-century
Tales,
themselves imported via the Japanese. One could say the same of many other plays, too, themselves based on a collage of pre-existing sources. I thought of C. J. Sisson's line, written about Indian drama but surely applicable to almost everything I'd come across since beginning my journeys in Germany: ‘things that are still alive and in process of becoming new things, being ever born again …'

Back in the UK, a director had recently set a production of
The Merchant of Venice
in a version of Las Vegas, converting ducats to dollars and casting Shylock as a casino moneylender. Many British critics had been aghast, rejecting this as a global transposition too far. I wondered how they would react if someone set the play right here in Shanghai.

At the station gates a stooped, crumpled-looking figure was waiting. He was dressed in a frayed grey jacket and rubber boots cut off at the ankle. His hair was thinning; above an open, somewhat boyish face his eyebrows were dark and thick, giving him an expression of mild alarm. Between his fingers he was twisting a furled umbrella.

Ya Zhou, my translator, rushed towards him: Zhu Shenghao's only son, now in his seventies. My contact had managed to get in touch with the family, who were only too delighted for me to visit the house museum in Jiaxing. A tour of the city library, where his manuscripts were now preserved, had also been arranged. Zhu Shanggang, the son, would meet us from the train.

Lifting the umbrella to ward off the spattering drizzle, he bowed repeatedly as he directed us towards the car, smiling anxiously in my direction. I had the uncomfortable sensation that I had been promoted to VIP status without my knowledge.

Fifteen minutes later we were at the museum: an ample farmhouse surrounding an open courtyard, now on a busy and featureless main road. As we went inside, we were descended on by a photographer, a woman from the local government culture department and a small flock of assistants. Attempting to get into the role of visiting dignitary, I seized the hand of a man who turned out to be the gardener. Everyone laughed gaily. At least it broke the ice.

As the museum and its entourage indicated, Zhu had attained a special position in the pantheon of Chinese literature, far above what might be expected of an amateur translator who had died in obscure rural poverty at the age of thirty-two. His versions of Shakespeare had now sold millions of copies – which meant, if my maths was correct, he was probably the world's most read Shakespearian translator in any language. The first translations to reach a mass Chinese audience, Zhu's were so popular that even seasoned scholars favoured them over later, more faithful versions – or, in some cases, the English texts.